Web pages, such as those implemented by the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Extensible Markup Language (XML), are common nowadays. Such web pages may be employed to provide information to the computer user as well as to receive user input. To receive user input, the web page may have one or more data input fields. The user may enter data of various formats and types into the different data input fields, as is well known.
To improve user-friendliness, some data input fields in a web page may employ an auto-complete feature to assist the user in the data entry task. In a typical prior art web page, such as one implementing the well-known Yahoo™ main search page (www.yahoo.com), the user may enter a search term, which may be a word or a phrase, into an appropriate field on the page in order to instruct the Yahoo search engine to search the web for the relevant web pages. By way of example, the user may enter the term “garden,” “gardening,” or “gardener” to pull up web pages related to various aspects of maintaining a garden.
To implement the auto-complete feature, the user-entered search terms are stored by the browser and subsequently presented to the user as selectable choices during the subsequent data entry. For example, if the user wishes to perform another search at a later time using the search term “gardening” again, the user may, upon typing the character “g,” be furnished with a dropdown list containing all the previously entered search terms that start with the character “g.” The user may then pick among the choices offered or may wish to continue typing to narrow down the list of choices in the drop-down list further.
Suppose the user continues typing and enters two more characters so that the characters “gar” are entered, and the only three previously entered terms that start with “gar” are the aforementioned terms “garden,” “gardening,” and “gardener.” In this case, the auto-complete feature would present the user with a shortened list containing only these three previously entered terms. At this point, the user may pick the presented choice “gardening” in the dropdown list (e.g., by using the mouse), thereby completing the desired data entry instead of having to type in the remaining six characters.
Of course if the user wishes to enter an entirely new search term such as “gardenia” to look up web pages containing relevant information about the cape jasmine shrub, the user may continue typing in order to manually input the entire search term. Since this new entry does not match any of the stored entries, the new entry is added to the historical data so that the next time the user performs a search, all four terms “garden,” “gardening,” “gardener,” and “gardenia” will be presented to the user after the user enters the characters “gar.”
Although the use of historical data (e.g., the previously entered terms) to implement the auto-complete feature is helpful in many cases, further refinements and/or alternate arrangements are possible. These further refinements and/or alternate arrangements are addressed herein.